I’ve heard this again and again. So, why’s it so hard? I’ve come to suspect that part of it has to do with the structure of communications within organizations. The centralized structure is a problem. We need to figure out how to make a distributed model work (see an early stab at how this could happen for a network or distributed team). You hear all the time about user-generated content. Well how about staff-generated content? Then the communicator becomes facilitator, supporter, curator. No longer struggling to find out what’s going on but rather focused on packaging and outreach.

This also has implications for knowledge sharing (or whatever KM is called these days) and organizational development. It’s about documenting learning, mistakes, victories. Taking the time to stop and think about process.

So as part of this thinking toward a new model I’ve developed (with help from my friends) a list of observations from my last ten or so years of experience. Mostly these are with international development organizations, most of which were implementing research or social change projects. They all had similar characteristics and issues:

• Multi-cultural teams made up of passionate, opinionated researchers and development professionals (read: herding cats)

• Partners who are at other times competitors

• Far-flung teams and partners facing similar issues and or learning things that are relevant to each other’s practice — they have things to share and are hungry for knowledge

• A “boss” (read: donor) who’s not at home — or several absent bosses each with different (sometimes shifting) priorities and stakeholders — so important spend time building understanding, updating, and demonstrating return on investment

• Disincentives to document or openly discuss failure stifles learning and innovation (this is the down side of the performance-based contract)

• Ability to see organizational issues but no way to fix them — Because of the nature of their work (talking with many team members, needing consistent updates, pushing for clarity on audiences, messages, activities) communicators’ work is affected by organizational issues and information flows, yet addressing these is outside of their mandate

• A “core + support” staff structure, where support staff often feel marginalized, their contributions and needs misunderstood or unacknowledged because they don’t do what the organization does (administration, finance, human resources, communications)

• Communicators not invited — and often must lobby — to attend meetings, events, or site visits that would allow them to better understand issues and activities, create richer content, and build relationships that improve information flows
• The staff closest to the work are least likely to communicate, so key information, learning, and stories often remains hidden
• Expectation that communicators can create compelling content from a mix of existing documents: proposals, contracts, presentations, various reports (coded, jargon-laden, sanitized, noisy)
• Communicators not in direct or regular contact with activities or colleagues in the field must use an investigative-journalist approach to dig up stories, which may annoy field staff as they’ve been preparing reports and communicating regularly with project managers

• Little attention or resources dedicated to internal systems (infrastructure + practices)

• Lack of coordination of basic information such as travel, events, and contacts leads to missed opportunities
• Productivity lost finding and re-finding assets
• Little time allocated to reflect on how the organization is working, what can be learned, and how to work better

Have you observed this? What’s the same? What’s different? How do you think these issues can be avoided or overcome? Any ideas for solutions?

If you’d like to contribute to the preservation of the garden as a wild space Emily posts community updates on her blog. And imagine (le) mile-end has been doing lots of great organizing. Here’s their report from the last meeting.

From the introduction:

Lot #2334609 is a terrain vague — owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, owned by the City of Montreal as of June 2009, used and cherished by the community, the only green space in the Mile End. People feel free in this space. They don’t ask for permission to picnic, grow things, create art, or gather around a campfire. It’s open and wild, unlike most city parks.

To outsiders, it may look like an abandoned field. But, as you will read here, the community has appropriated this space and wants a say in how it will be developed. Development is scheduled for 2009-2010, as part of the city’s $9-million revitalization of the neighborhood.

Emily Rose Michaud, through the Sprout Out Loud! gardener’s collective, created the Roerich Garden project in November 2007. Using this project as a starting point, this book provides a history of the meadow and documents the many ways the community uses and relates to this space. It then connects what’s happening in the Mile End to similar local, national, and international initiatives. It documents what the community wants for this space, as captured through a series of participatory consultations. And it asks questions about how we engage as citizens to imagine and create more open cities.

If you’d like to get (infrequent) updates about this project and the book you can sign up.

Funny. I just got my favorite jeans repaired (two pairs, the bottoms went out on me), as well as my favorite fuchsia heels. I had to go to three shoe repair shops. The first dismissed me, the second told me to throw them away, and I managed to convince the third one — although I had to dig through a dirty old box to find the right heels. Now they are black — more character. “Will your husband mind?” said the guy. Uh-huh, right.

This also makes me think of the whole cradle-to-cradle idea.

Then, there’s Ryan Paul’s piece in Wired on hackable hardware:

Open source hardware is designed to be reprogrammed or physically modified to make it easy to install custom firmware and software to create entirely new products. The big idea: crowdsourcing hardware development will encourage innovation in unforeseen ways, much like how Creative Commons licenses have enabled artists to remix existing content to create new works.

… Not all gadget makers embrace this trend and a growing number of them are fighting back by blocking installation of custom software or slapping on warranty stickers to discourage would-be developers from opening up their gear and tweaking the electronics. (Apple has been particularly aggressive about discouraging iPhone hackers.)

Then there are companies like OpenMoko, a spinoff of Taiwan’s First International Computer, established to build an open source touchscreen smartphone.

“For the people pushing this project, an open phone is not really even a product. It’s the very embodiment of our vision of technology,” OpenMoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz wrote in 2007. “We absolutely, passionately, believe that something as fundamental to our lives as the mobile phone must be open.”

The hardware schematics, CAD files and source code of the OpenMoko mobile phone handsets have all been made available under open licenses so they can be freely modified and redistributed. The project quickly attracted attention in the open source software community and became a hub of activity for open smartphone development.

Will follow this with interest.

Knowledge workers are an investment rather than an expense. They not only desire considerable personal autonomy but also the responsibility and accountability for running at least some part of an organization. They need to be treated as partners or associates and not as typical Industrial Age employees.

I have often felt this. It’s part of why I work freelance. He goes on:

… the more people are given a voice and implicit control in managing a venture, the more the informal networks (present in every entity) will begin to function more in the open and start making appropriate connections with other emergent groups.

Ehin talks about the importance of tacit knowledge. How it’s difficult to access, share, and transfer to others without extensive personal contact and trust. How it’s based on habits and culture that we do not recognize in ourselves. And, most interestingly, how it emerges serendipitously as individuals or small groups confront new or unanticipated situations.

“People must first be surrounded by a supportive environment,” he writes. This is what I’ve been thinking too. This is why building connections and community within the organization matters so much. Why getting internal communications right matters so much. We not only have to do our work — we need to take time every once and a while to reflect on how we’re doing it. Especially in an ever-changing environment.

Ehin’s “organizational sweet spot” represents “the area where the formal and informal systems of an organization have reached “a meeting of the minds” over the fundamental goals, policies and processes of an organization. …What can be managed or adjusted is the organizational context or ecology that surrounds the sweet spot.” Makes me think of the New Institutional Economics. Incentives matter. Institutions matter. Especially the informal ones. Systems, culture, the framework in which we operate.

He goes on to outline two categories of organizational ecologies. I’m paraphrasing here:

• Controlled-Access System — Access to the resources of a group and its activities are controlled by one or a few select individuals. All other members of the organization must first get approval from these executives before any of the assets can be used. Compliance instead of commitment is prized.
• Shared-Access System — The resources of a group and its activities are dealt with by all members of an organization. All organizational members have considerable autonomy in decision-making and in resource allocations. Expert power instead of position power dominates. Emphasis is placed on situational leadership, open book management, and self-organization in solving problems or pursuing opportunities (read: “open organization”).

This example really hit home: “I would like to download a free Web resource which will help me perform my job better, but the IT Department will not allow me to do that.”

Oh boy. That is me. I did it anyway. Sorry about that IT dudes ;)

Apparently François worked with a bunch of Drupal hackers and social scientists and day laborers to create the site and make it work with cheap phones. Together, they’ve created an great web presence. People text in their stories. The research team shares their results via social media. They made all their decisions transparent. As Joe said: “It’s complete, cool, and credible. All the bits from everyone involved start to accumulate online into a rich picture.”

I found a NetSquared intervew with François about the project. Some excerpts:

When people talk about “the great democratization of public discourse” via blogging and so on, it is often forgotten that many people don’t have access to an advanced phone, or even to a computer or connection to the Internet…. The workers we’re working with have cheap phones and [those phones] are often prepaid… One of the big driving principals of the project was for us to take a look at these factors and then do as much as we could with as little as possible.

We have been experimenting with doing what we’re trying to do safely, anonymously, and cheaply. Also, the advantage of using prepaid phones is that day laborers occasionally lose their phones. Since prepaid phones are almost disposable, if it is lost, it isn’t the end of the world.

What is also very interesting is to look at cell phones as gateway technologies. The laborers will take pictures and record sounds and then they will come to computers in our labs because they are interested in looking at the pictures, reprocessing them, and remixing them. They make movies with the sounds they recorded and the pictures they have taken. First they take the pictures and they record the sound and then they want to come and use the computer to manipulate them.

And I went to look at the project site. I found this:

We have a weekly workshop at IDEPSCA where the popular communication team meets to analyze stories, develop shared knowledge, design the system, and create training materials. The popular communication team is composed of day laborers and a domestic worker who have been volunteering for IDEPSCA for many years and who take their role of writing their own history very seriously. We also meet each week at USC to develop research and writing about the project.

I feel so happy when I learn about projects like this.

My focus here is on developing a better way to work for distributed, multidisciplinary, cross-cultural teams. More specifically research teams, international development projects, social change initiatives.

I’ll add the resources I find so far to this post. So it will get updated as I find new ones and learn which are most helpful.

If you have anything you think I should look at please let me know.

—— a crazy mix of everything for now ——

Bookmarks

Gary M. Olson & Judith S. Olson. “Distance Matters,” in Human Computer Interaction. School of Information, University of Michigan. (Download PDF)

Karen Sobel Lojeski, Richard Reilly, Peter Dominick, “Multitasking and Innovation in Virtual Teams,” hicss, pp.44b, 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’07), 2007

Tracey P. Lauriault and D. R. Fraser Taylor (2005) “Cybercartography and the New Economy: Collaborative Research in Action,” Chapter 8 in Cybercartography: Theory and Practice. Edited by D. R. F. Taylor.

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) annual conferences. The 2009 conference website has a good summary of prior CHI conferences.

Facilitating online: A course leader’s guide. Tony Carr, Shaheeda Jaffer and Jeanne Smuts. 2009. Published by the Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town. (More for online educators but looks helpful for practical tips and explanations.)

Adaptive Path’s case study about developing Ashoka’s Changemakers website — with a distributed team.

I’ve not yet read the whole paper, but sharing this part because found it helpful. It’s practical information to keep in mind to develop a strategy that works.

Descriptive Characteristics of University-based Research Groups

1. The reliance on short-term support from students thus causing turnover issues.
2. Students hired into these projects are given the ‘‘unfaculty’’ title as they do not adhere to a particular discipline and are of a different status than professors.
3. The limitations of funding often impedes travel and face-to-face interaction at conferences and thus time and resources allocated to networking is often scarce for smaller projects.
4. Balancing size and innovation; often the smaller the group the lesser the innovation; while a very large group requires too much structure.
5. Time pressures are significant since in academia the quantity of publications at times is considered more important than their quality.
6. Campus location and space is often an issue, in particular access to meeting space
7. Teaching tends to take priority over project demands
8. Researchers often do not like to disassociate themselves from their disciplinary institutions for fear of ‘‘out of mind out of sight’’ issues.
9. The advantage of a university setting, however, is access to a wide array of intellectual and infrastructure resources.
10. Organizational culture is a factor for these groups since, in a university setting, people choose to work on problems they like since there is no incentive to do otherwise, which increases the level of commitment
11. Often, but not always, a university setting is generally considered egalitarian — reducing the friction between the disciplines.

Adapted from Epton et al. (1983), Managing Interdisciplinary Research.

Today I learned that University of Notre Dame, with funding from the John Templeton Foundation, has three million bucks to advance the field of generosity research. They’re defining generosity as “the virtue of giving good things to others freely and abundantly”. The lit reviews they have commissioned so far cover topics like Generous Financial Giving and Philanthropy, the Social Psychology of Generosity, Corporate Giving, and Religious Giving.

What I’d like to learn more about is why people are generous to each other in terms of their affection, attention, and time. More specifically, why are people generous to each other online? What makes that geek in some forum deep in cyberspace answer my desperate technical questions? Why do people contribute to open and collaborative projects? I want to know more about the relationship between generosity and peer production. I have yet to read Clay Shirkey and am only halfway through Coase’s Penguin. I note that Benkler cites classic sociological and anthropological texts related to gift-giving (exchange) and economic theories of the organization. What would he do, I wonder, with more learning on generosity? Does the net make it easier to be generous?

Download the full announcement: http://generosityresearch.nd.edu/request-for-proposals/pdf-of-rfp/

Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) is an experimental web platform that crowdsources crisis information. People can submit reports via text messaging using a mobile phone, email, or the web. Looks like it can be deployed (sorry, geek speak) for a specific crisis. It was most recently use to track events in Gaza and was also used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Users can submit or track by category: riot, looting, sexual assault… (reads like humanity’s list of shame). The results are aggregated onto a map. They can also upload photos and post links to videos and news stories.

The project is free and open source, with developers from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Netherlands, and the United States. If you’re a developer and would like to participate you can join here.

And on top of everything, the design of their site rocks ;)

Related: Blogging for Good Governance

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.

I’ve never focused on originality. I can appreciate it, but don’t aspire to it. Innovation maybe, as in finding a better way. In the forefront of my mind? Healing, integrity, justice, peace, empathy. That’s what gets me going. To love. To repair the world. Better to focus on understanding and sharing. Better to focus on being authentic. That is hard enough and good enough for me.

I learned about the film on Véro’s blog a few weeks ago and really wanted to see it. Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about things open, creative commons, and remix (read/write) culture. So my Friday evening is off to a great start. Will let you know how it goes.